Green In Zion's Valley

I am sitting in Page, Arizona, looking back toward the west, out over Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, both man made marks on the Western landscape. Today is Earth Day. It is a day when the "beauty of the earth" and the "glory of the skies" creep to the forefront of the news headlines.

Yesterday Ed and I spent a remarkable day at Zion Canyon National Park. We rode the natural gas powered shuttle buses which removed carbon emissions from the valley. We packed in our own water bottles and packed them out again. Stations provide water in the park, but you provide your own bottle. We stayed on the trails and "left no footprint behind." Fragile environments are protected from the erosion of too many footsteps.

Way back when President Theodore Roosevelt and others imagined national spaces, and way back when Gaylord Nelson thought up Earth Day, Americans were somewhat in denial as a people that green spaces and green ways would become important.

Wandering through the green valley of Zion Canyon yesterday, watching the Virgin River's silty, tumbling waters nourish the cottonwoods and the ponderosa pines for yet another spring, one thinks of the sacredness that the spaces like parks and lakes and rivers and deserts and mountains and plains provide. The environmental/conservation movement has been labeled "green," but in reality it's a rainbow. From the earth tones of the deserts, to majestic purple mountains, to the lavishness of sunrises and sunsets, to the green of rolling farmlands, Earth Day reminds us of the humble responsibility we have as caretakers of a still fragile planet.

My 2011 Earth Day wish? I wish for green in Zion's Valley for generations to come.